"Sex is a lifelong conversation."
This is one of a handful of sex educator mantras. Sex educators say it because it’s true, and because it disrupts the expected narrative about how we (should) talk about sex. We're told that sex education comes in the form of "The Conversation" or a special guest teacher in health class. We're told that if you do the right thing once, you've done your job. In other words, we're lied to. Sex educators, hopefully, know better. Disappointingly though, no matter how much they believe it for others, many sex educators don’t practice what they preach when it comes to the lifelong part.
The best sex educators I know never stop learning, never stop wanting to learn. To be open to learning something new is to be vulnerable and exposed. It means throwing yourself into a process and engaging with ideas and other people without knowing what the outcome will be. It’s exposing your own biases and prejudices, not to mention your own desires. It’s not easy, but the best sex educators I know are tough. And it's scary stuff. I understand why so many people are relieved once they become educators and can turn to teaching instead of learning.
The process of professionalizing as a sex educator doesn’t help. In fact like so many other systems that create professionals, the process of becoming a professional sex educator includes many implicit and sometimes explicit messages that you as a professional are the one with answers. Your clients are the ones with questions. There’s always a gesture toward continuing education, but this is understood as being more about sharpening your skills, not challenging whether they work or still have meaning. To become a professional sex educator is often to be given permission to stop learning.
This doesn’t happen by accident. It isn’t a conspiracy to mediocrity (although some days it feels like that). It occurs within systems of power and privilege which exist all around us; systems we are born into and participate in everyday. And it isn't that once you become a professional you stop changing. Change is one of lifes few constants. The problem is not that we stop changing as we become professionals. The problem is that we stop paying attention and we stop challenging our ways of understanding what it is we do and what change is happening.
There's another reason it's easy for sex educators to stop learning. So much of sex education is about facilitating growth or change in the people we work with. To do this we begin by focusing on an attitude or behavior that is identified as an obstacle to sexual health. Even in the act of focusing on one aspect of an activity we begin a process of distortion and reduction of sexual experience. We may think about the steps involved in negotiating safer sex, or navigating a homophobic world, or communicating a challenge to a partner. We attempt to take these infinitely complicated interactions apart and talk about them, teach about them, one at a time. After a few years of doing this it’s easy to think that we actually know what any of this means. If your job involves teaching safer sex workshops, it’s hard not to come to believe that you know what safer sex means, that it has a shared meaning, and that people can do this, if they can only follow these steps, or go through a previously verified process of personal transformation.
Of course, this is nonsense. No aspect of sexuality, no matter how carefully parsed, is ever so easily known. These aren’t just interactions, they are personal, interpersonal, and social phenomenon. They are tied to our history and our present. We act within a network of motivations, feelings, influences, and impulses that are often unknown to us even at our most introspective moments. We come to think of these things as simple, just wearing a condom every time you have sex, or stifling a desire to isolate and punish those who are different from you and scare you. But these things aren’t simple at all.
Still, a sex educator’s work is often repetitive, and it is the rare and tenacious sex educator who can manage, in the face of what feels like a Sisyphean task, to stay open to the infinite variations in what can seem like a sea of sameness.
And so we begin to believe that our goals are simple and humans are just stubborn. We learn our material, develop a way of presenting it that feels right, and then educate the hell out of it. It’s a difficult path to avoid. But you take it at your own peril, and to the detriment of those you’re educating.
When you stop taking risks, when you stop learning, the people you teach can tell. Your students know the difference between an expert who wants to tell them what to do and a teacher who is willing to support them in their own process. And when you stop taking risks yourself, you start to lose empathy for the risks that students are taking. What may feel like monumental change to them seems like not enough to you.
Finally in reducing sexuality to components both arbitrary and sometime imaginary, we can easily forget how complicated it is, and therefore how much more we have to learn, even about the very things we teach every day.
